Fix School Discipline Toolkit for Educators | Page 42
HIGHLIGHT: RICHMOND HIGH SCHOOL
West Contra Costa Unified School District
How did Catholic Charities get involved in
providing training and technical assistance to
schools around Restorative Justice?
Millie Burns, RJ Consultant and Former Catholic
Charities Deputy Chie f of Programs: In 2009, our
focus on the very real and strong evidence about the
impact that trauma has on the ability of students to
learn then led us to highlight the Restorative Justice
(RJ) work at our annual public policy conference. We
then followed up with a teach-in in January of 2009,
which consisted of presentations of RJ approaches
and practices presented by RJOY and a powerful
presentation led by youth from Youth UpRising who
had completed our 3 –day restorative justice Peace
Academy. Two staff members from Richmond High
attended that training, and they immediately said we
need to do this. We had a grant - $10,000 from Kaiser
Permanente – which helped to support the work, and
Buzz Sherwood, one the retired teachers still working
at the school part-time, and I began doing restorative
circles.
Buzz talked the school into doing a $4,000 contract
with RJOY, which provided two weekends of training
with mixed faculty and students. The next year,
we had $15,000 to support peacemaking circles for
students. In 2011-12, the California Endowment gave
us a grant that, for the first time, allowed us to have
a significant presence at the school. We had Mr.
Sherwood as the school-based lead on site for three
days a week and a Catholic Charities restorative
practices coach on-site for four days a week, and then
we kicked the effort into high gear. It was that year
that the school brought suspensions down by 53%.
We always monitor all of the baseline and other data
closely, and I have a program analyst who tracks the
changes, so we have charts that measure objectively
how we are doing and our analyst works closely with
the school to verify the accuracy of the data. This is
critical.
40 How we can fix school discipline
How did you achieve such a significant decrease
in suspensions in a short period of time?
Well, one of the practices that the school realized was
troubling was a policy created to lock out students if
they were tardy to school. If students were tardy, then
they would assign them to detention. Then, when
the young person did not show up for detention,
they would assign them to Saturday school. Then,
if they did not show up for Saturday school, they
would suspend them for “willful defiance.” We could
attribute more than 400 suspensions to this one
practice, and not only was it escalating tension at the
school but it was one of those policies that result in
disconnecting and disengaging students also known
as “school push-out.”
This one practice was really emblematic of the larger
issue that we all have to deal with at our schools and
in society and that the administration of Richmond
High was willing to address and shift to more
restorative and supportive practices. This is only one
example of how strongly people in our society believe
in punishment. They believe it works, and they
believe that if it is not meted out that they are not
being tough enough. The truth is that the punitive
practices we have been using in our schools not only
don’t work, but they seem to exacerbate the problems
we have with school drop outs and failure.
How did you begin implementation at Richmond
High and how are you doing it at other schools in
the District?
When we took the trainings and practices from the
restorative justice context, where circle practice is
supposed to be unlimited and the recommendation
is to provide five full days of training before you
get started, to the school context, we realized that
the traditional approaches would not work, given
the logistical realities of schools. We needed to
adapt and change to address the time and staffing